Sophia Pompéry

Sophia Pompéry studied sculpture with Karin Sander and Antje Majewski at the Weissensee Academy of Art Berlin. Until 2011, she was a participant in Olafur Eliasson's Institute for Spatial Experiments at the Berlin University of the Arts. Residency scholarships took her to Istanbul (DAAD), the Kunstdepot Göschenen in Switzerland, and most recently to the Museum Kunst der Westküste in Föhr.

She has been awarded the Mart Stam Prize, the Diffring Prize and a grant from the Kunstfonds Bonn. Her works have been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, ARTER Istanbul, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Akademie der Künste and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, among others.

Ground Control

„Die Kunst tritt als Mittlerin zwischen die Natur und den Menschen. Das Urbild ist der Menge zu groß, zu erhaben, um es erfassen zu können.“ Caspar D. Friedrich

(Art acts as a mediator between nature and humans. The archetype is too big, too sublime for the masses to grasp.)

My goal is to capture the fragility of human standards. Drawing on elements of Romanticism, I transform familiar things, such as landscapes, maps and measuring instruments, into parables: a deep blue circle could be a picture puzzle, but turns out to be a physical map of night-time light pollution. A column could be made of marble, but is actually made of compressed powder; and a series of photographs turns the landscape upside down with the question of whether a positive can also be a negative, while scales of different lengths cast doubt on our measure of things. Physical experiments will give rise to conceptual works that play with the laws of nature, viewing habits and expectations.